By "We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there," President Obama said after the coup took place. "It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition, rather than democratic elections."
Yet the government under Roberto Micheletti installed by the coup leaders remains in place, however unpopular it may be. Democratic forces ranged against the coup in Honduras deserve greater support if the political situation in central and Latin America is not to be thrown backwards to a period when coups and right wing military dictatorships were commonplace.
This Wednesday the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party Tony Lloyd will be among those speaking at a public meeting*, organised by the emergency committee against the coup in Honduras, at the Unite trade union - discussing how to further extend international support for a return to democracy in Honduras. Labour members should take the issue up as a case of internationalism of the most important kind. In such situations interntional support can be decisive.
The situation in Honduras is extremely tense. Against the claims of the coup government Zelaya managed to return to his country where he is currently based in the Brazilian embassy, itself now the focus of state-sponsored attack. Zelaya's return is intolerable to the coup leadership which has responded with repression and violence. Simultaneously they have spent thousands of dollars to mobilise right wing opinion in Washington.
President Zelaya was first kidnapped by the military, removed from his home by force, prevented from communicating with the outside world for several hours and then violently expelled from Honduras.
As Greg Grandin reports in The Nation Amnesty International has documented a "sharp rise in police beatings, mass arrests of demonstrators, and intimidation of human rights defenders" since Zelaya's return to Tegucigalpa. Protests have been met with security forces rounding up demonstrators, holding some of the detained in football stadia; there are reports of people being tortured, burned with cigarettes and sodomized by batons; troops have harassed the Brazilian embassy with tear gas, other weapons and sonic devices. Over a dozen people - all opposed to the coup - have been murdered since Zelaya's overthrow, according to numbers released by COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras). "Honduras risks spiraling into a state of lawlessness, where police and military act with no regard for human rights or the rule of law," said Susan Lee, Americas director at Amnesty International.
The coup is linked up to US political forces with a long track record of ruthlessly destabilising central and Latin America. The New York Times last week exposed the lobbying campaign working to support the illegal government. The coup, the New York Times reported, has "drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and ’90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war." They include figures such as Otto Reich, who was Bush’s ambassador to Venezuela at the time of the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez, which ended in failure, but which Reich backed; and Roger Noriega, co-author of the Helms-Burton Act, which brutally tightened the stranglehold of the illegal blockade against Cuba.
Zelaya's crime in the eyes of the Republican right is no doubt his programme of intervention into the economy to improve the conditions of the majority, as his daughter documented in the New Statesman last month.
The problem remains that while the US has joined international condemnation it has not taken decisive measures to turn that rhetoric into reality - unlike many governments in the region.
Forces in central and Latin America that favour right wing military coups to block the will of the people look primarily to the USA: they know they could not survive without significant support and political sponsorship from powerful forces to their north.
The Obama Presidency can and should decisively break with the past by facing down domestic right wing pressure and taking firm action to delegitimise and further isolate a coup it itself says is illegal.
* Restore democracy in Honduras – No more dictators in Latin America; End all US financial support to the coup. Speakers include Ken Livingstone, Tony Lloyd MP (Chair, Parliamentary Labour Party), Sally Hunt (TUC General Council International Spokesperson), Colin Burgon MP.
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We are a tiny island of minor significance that has a whole heap of problems of our own. It's not our battle and its arrogant to suggest that we have to interfere.
However, isn't this more about political pressure, and anyone has the right to express concerns or lobby for a cause. I hardly think its going to lead to an invasion
Pity that wasn't observed elsewhere.
Although it doesn't sound like a particularly healthy situation over there, I'm at a loss to what this has to do with our politicians? We don't police the world, neither do the Americans and there are much more oppressive societies, arguably none quite as poor a nation as Honduras, but oppressive all the same. Is it up to our politicians here to tell them what type of government they must have? Must every country be democratic or are countries allowed to follow their own course of development?
If we're going to stick our beaks in here, how about many of the South African nations? Or Burma? Maybe Libya or even China? Where do we draw the line of sticking our noses into other countries political status?
Change the word Honduras to Iraq and ask our troops and the 600,000 dead Iraqis how they feel , If we are to have this standerd then it must be one rule for all .
But our inaction over China , Zimbarbwie shows that the world comunity is failing .
ricki